BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - March 8, 2011) - Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS) has published its latest look at onboarding and the role it plays in improving productivity and organizational performance. The report, "Onboarding 2011: The Path to Productivity," highlights the critical tactics and strategies of onboarding that allow top performing companies to achieve three times the employee retention, and twice the number of highly engaged new hires. The study also addresses the onboarding of contingent labor, which makes up a growing percentage of the workforce for many organizations today.

"The findings point to two clear differentiators of top performance," said Mollie Lombardi, senior research analyst for human capital management, Aberdeen. "First, organizations must standardize the process to ensure a quality experience, and then they must automate that process to gain efficiencies." The study reports that 82% of all organizations have a standard onboarding process in place, but top performing companies are 16% more likely than lower performing organizations to do so. The findings also show that companies with a standard onboarding process experienced 54% greater new hire productivity, saw 50% greater new hire retention, and two-times the level of new hire engagement as compared to those that did not.

Top performing companies are taking advantage of automation as well, and are twice as likely as other companies to describe their onboarding process as fully automated. Automation of just two elements, new hire forms and benefits enrollment, resulted in triple the year-over-year improvement in hiring manager satisfaction and 16% greater new hire retention.

About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks CompanyAberdeen provides fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having queried more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to Aberdeen for insights that drive decisions.

As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen's analytical and independent view of the "customer optimization" process of Harte-Hanks (Information - Opportunity - Insight - Engagement - Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen or call (617) 854-5200, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748.